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Gov. Mitt Romney accepted the Republican presidential nomination last night with a solid speech. He expressed raw emotion when speaking about his late parents and the bond he has with his family. Missing, however, was much of an explanation about his policies and how they’d help improve the lives of Americans.

Was Romney able to deliver his best possible introduction to the American people? What went well, what didn’t?

The American people have had months to listen to the stump speeches, opposition counter messaging and pundit campaign desection. Last night was about who is Mitt, and I liked what I heard.

In his speech he did reaffirm the contrast between two different men and two different routes into the future for America. I know he hit his marks as I listened to progressive media outlets sound concerned over the reactions of people in general.

Next week President Obama will not have the luxuries he enjoyed in 2008, when he was more of a movement candidate as opposed to the now humanized mortal politico.

In stark contrast to Obama, Romney's plainly not comfortable tooting his own horn. He'll stand out in Washington. Thus it fell to others last night to bring out his many good qualities, and they did it well.

But put the Romney and Ryan speeches together, as the Wall Street Journal does admirably this morning, then contrast that with what you hear from the Obama camp, and you get an equally stark picture of the differences between the two parties. As the Journal says, Obama's single greatest flaw is that "he thinks economic growth can be ordered up by central planners. Tax more here, spend more there, regulate this or subsidize that, and prosperity will follow."

Romney and Ryan know better. Prosperity comes from the bottom up - from free people pursuing their dreams, not from government planners. Our stagnant economy is no accident. Obama's done all the wrong things. As the chant went last night, "He just doesn't get it."

The big question is whether enough Americans get it. These are not easy ideas to communicate through the fog of campaign rhetoric. But these last few days were a good start.

Ryan said that Republicans were the party of leadership and the only ones willing to face hard policy choices. Yet Romney did none of that.

The speech was filled with platitudes and surprising little policy content. Romney can't decide whether he wins by going hard right to mobilize the party base or coming across as a nice and competent manager.

This has been pointed out before but there is an issue when a man who has been running for president for over six years has to “introduce himself” to the American people. The problem is 90 percent of Americans already have an opinion on Mitt Romney so there is very little room for an introduction. The bigger problem for Romney is that he is still underwater on his favorables (41-48 averaged across polls), and this week will not change those numbers in any meaningful way.

The whole week felt a little more like an audition for GOP 2016 than the Romney Show and it is clear that anger/hatred of the president is the real motivator for the GOP this year, versus support for Romney. This is 2004 in reverse where Democrats were motivated by hatred of Bush and really had little love for Sen. John Kerry. As we saw eight years ago, hate only gets you so far.

The most shocking thing this week was that once again Team Romney is showing they are not ready for primetime.

Not fact checking a speech (and clearly Ryan’s speech was not checked), letting other speeches upstate your nominee, and letting Romney make a joke about rising sea level when flood was going on in LA and MS are just rookie mistakes. None of these things are going to make or break the campaign but it just shows the lack of attention to detail that does not instill confidence that the Romney Camp will be able to pull off a needed ground game in November or run the campaign needed over the next two months.

There was little to nothing that will change the dynamic of this race over the last three days and the good news for Obama is that Romney did nothing to change the narrative or projection of this race.

Gov. Romney noted that then nominee-Obama had promised four years ago to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet; his promise was to try to make your life a little better. My conservative friends thought it a wonderful line that contrasted the grandiosity and pomposity of President Obama with the actual poor performance of his policies once in office - and I suspect what few undecideds may have been watching found it a welcome line, too. But my liberal friends, four years later, still really take that kind of Obama pledge seriously - of course the president should slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. That reflects, truly, the different expectations and philosophies of government.

Romney got a rousing ovation when he promised to repeal Obamacare, and Republican strategists would do well to remember than Obamacare is highly unpopular not only in the convention hall, but with independents and loosely attached voters.

In the end, this race will come down much like that of 1980. Voters know that Obama, has failed, just as they knew that about Carter in 1980. It's not that he's the devil or that everything he's done is bad, and I think that's a point Romney tried to make last night. But, overall, he's failed. So voters, as in 1980, just have to decide if they are prepared to vote in a man whom they have heard vilified in the most extreme terms by the Democrats. And they wonder, are all these terrible things said about Reagan/Romney true? What if there's even a possibility they are true? Reagan slowly overcame that resistance, winning voters over as they actually got to see him, and clinching the deal with a stunning performance is his debate with Carter. Romney took a big step in that direction last night, but still has to clinch the deal. In the meantime, there's little for Obama to do but to keep heaping vituperation on Romney and hope that in the end, unlike 1980, voters decide they are so afraid of change that they will accept four more years of mediocrity.

He had a low bar to meet in that he needed to show he had a human side and could connect with people. He achieved that.

However, he was surprisingly sparse in details on what a Romney presidency would look like. Many of the undecided voters in the CNN focus group mentioned this. All of the above said, there is no question that Romney's relatively successful speech is partly overshadowed by the bizarre Clint Eastwood episode. I have never seen anything like that in the history of American political conventions. The cringe-worthy Eastwood act is what many are talking about the morning after, and not Romney's speech.

Romney's speech was about a B or B+ effort, in my opinion. It was relatively well practiced and delivered - considering Romney was the deliverer - but it was far from inspiring or spine-tingling.

(Get on YouTube and watch Reagan's acceptance speech at the 1980 GOP convention, by way of comparison, or even Clinton's address to the 2000 Democratic convention.) Rather, it was more of a typical Romneyesque check-the-box exercise.

Mention my mom as a way to give a shout-out to women, among whom I'm trailing badly. Check. Mention the words Bain Capital because few others at the convention did, not even my wife. Check. Mention my church so I don't get accused again of avoiding my Mormon faith. Check. Mention "attacking success" to deflect attention away from the fact that so far I've released only one year of my tax returns. Check. Mention Jimmy Carter so I can somehow twin Obama with him. Check. And so on and so forth.

It was a workman-like speech, but it's hard to see how it gives the still-opaque, stick-figure Romney much of a bounce coming out of his convention.

I think that's about as good as the guy can do. He can't really offer specifics, because his policies are incoherent. Balance the budget, but cut taxes, reverse Medicare cuts and increase defense spending? Balance the budget by killing the wind energy tax credit? Riiight.

But of course, style trumps substance. And on those grounds, well, he's no Rubio. He's not even a Rob Portman. He's just terminally incapable of appearing genuine.

My high school basketball coach once sat in on a meeting with a college coach who was recruiting me. "Too bad you can't teach height," he said. The college coach nodded grimly, much as Romney's speech coaches likely did last night.

"I don’t get the sense that Romney came across as sincere. To be perfectly clear about this, looking sincere is not the same thing as being sincere - John Edwards and Paul Ryan are both incredibly good at looking sincere....The best he could do was a furrowed-brow expression that made him look as though he were about to cry at any moment for his entire 45-minute speech."

Jeremy MayerAssociate Professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University :

It was a very good speech, and augurs well for the debates this fall. Romney was personable, articulate, and has gotten much better at reading a teleprompter than he was four years ago.

The strong part was his defense of Bain, and of his vision of capitalism, as well as the rising tempo of the peroration at the end. That was classic, surfing on the excitement wave he created.

The low point was the utter lack of specifics. That is not uncommon among challengers; it is the incumbent who must run on the details of a record. But Romney is taking it to an extreme. We don't know what he will replace Obamacare with. We don't know how he will "create jobs" beyond stale Bush policies that failed last time. We don't remotely know how he will make his fiscal policies add up. He refuses to say what programs he will cut, even in vague terms. He refuses to say what tax breaks he will trim or eliminate, even in vague terms. As a political speech, it was easily a B+. As a policy speech, it was an F.

For Mitt Romney, this was an outstanding speech; emotional, factual, and exciting. It was substance over symbolism, not wild and bizarre promises like President Obama’s famous boast “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” We’ve had enough flash and imagery over the past four years; the country wants seriousness right now.

In the end, however, the Governor’s speech is in the eye of the beholder. The speech was aimed at Republicans, independents, undecideds, and conservative Democrats and perhaps a few liberals who have thrown-in the Obama towel. The speech was effective and it sent limited government advocates into the fall election season energized and enthused.

The speech was not aimed at far-left liberals like NBC News analyst Lawrence O’Donnell who, on Wednesday, made the annoying stretch (if that’s what you call it) that any criticism of President Obama’s 117 rounds of golf is code to link him with Tiger Woods’ philandering problems. (I need to get a hold of this code book; it’s getting larger by the night.)

O’Donnell viewed the speech as some kind of a declaration of war against Iran stating "entering into a war with Iran is not agreeable to independents." Not to be outdone, his chum, Chris Matthews, described the speech as "It was a war-like speech. It put us on a war footing.”

I suppose the NBC wing of the Democrat Party might view Gov. Romney’s speech in such an insane negative light, but I would say lucid Americans of all races, creeds, colors, and backgrounds were all wiping a tear from their eye as Mitt teared-up while telling the story of how his father left a rose for his mother on the nightstand every morning of their marriage. The Governor went on… “That's how she found out what happened on the day my father died - she went looking for him because that morning, there was no rose.”

To America, that is a touching and truly personal moment in a man’s life. To Matthews, O’Donnell and their ilk, that story suggests that the tanks are ready to roll into Tehran.

It is safe to say that Governor Romney will receive no votes out of NBC News, but speaking for the rest of the country, I think Mitt did a terrific job; he’s doing alright. I look forward to seeing him take the oath of office in January of 2013.

The evening was a disaster for the Romney campaign that made one of the most horrible strategic blunders in convention history. How they could put Clint Eastwood in their one hour of broadcast time without vetting what he was going to say is unbelievable.

People aren't talking about Mitt Romney today, they are talking about Clint Eastwood. When we look back on conventions of past, this convention will always be remembered as the one that featured Clint Eastwood's sad and awkward appearance that stole the spotlight from the Republican nominee.

The campaign should have run the film that had aired earlier to introduce Romney. It was well-produced and would have kept the focus where it should have been: on Mitt Romney.

Compared to Eastwood, there was little to remember about Romney's speech. He succeeded at showing some emotion but then he undercut its authenticity by making a number of snarky comments. He also sounded like George W. Bush - ready, willing and wanting to be able to plunge us into another war with Iran. Romney also failed to offer any specifics and new ideas while making a new jobs creation promise that simply is not possible for him to fulfill.

Mitt Romney wants us to know that he believes in America. I'm sorry, but who doesn't? His pitch to voters was "vote for me because I love America and America is number one" because he has no substance to offer a more meaningful pitch of what he can actually do to move our nation forward.

Bottom line, Mitt Romney remains the candidate of little style and absolutely no substance and after last night he still comes across as the corporate CEO who puts people out of work rather than a caring and compassionate leader who wants to help make our lives better.

While he was a long way from delivering an Earth-shattering oration, he managed to break out of the two-dimensional portrait of him as a secretive and ruthless businessman that had been drawn by Democrats these last many months. And while many have criticized his speech as lacking in policy specifics, Romney did precisely what he needed to do last night. He showed Americans that he's not just a person with the right experience, but that he's also a person with the right heart. His rarely-confessed emotional sentiments relating to his parents, wife, and children that were woven throughout his speech revealed his humanity and demonstrated his loyalty.

As Richard Fenno understood, voting is not simply a transaction, it's an act of trust. Whether voters choose to trust Romney with the presidency is still an open question, but for the moment, it's clear that he's at least made the effort to extend his hand.

Gov. Romney gave a good speech to the base of the Republican Party, replete with pro-life, anti-public school, anti-environment, anti-tax messages.

He seemed to acknowledge that he will never topple the president on the likeability index, and sought to give "permission" to swing voters to like Obama but not vote for him. But the reasons Romney sought to give for why they should choose him over Obama seemed to fall into one major theme: that Romney was a successful CEO and businessman, and that for a jobs economy, you need a President who knows how to run a business. But it is risky. Perot, Whitman, Fiorina - the political landscape of America is littered with the burnt-out wreckages of CEO-themed campaigns.

Romney is going to need to do more than that and offer broad platitudes to wedge the American people from giving Obama another four years. Expect next weeks' Democratic Convention to remind the American people of the mess Obama inherited, the tough decisions he made, and the fact that the Republican Party had amnesia about how the GOP-led Congress has blocked almost every other reform that Obama has pushed to bring the economy back from the brink and, the contrary, pushed deficit-busting policies that would end Medicare, punish the poor, and reward the wealthy.

On the most important night of his professional life, Mitt Romney thought it was wise to put Clint Eastwood on the stage in prime time to deliver what was best described by a character in Mel Brooks’ "Blazing Saddles" as “authentic frontier gibberish.” There’s no excuse for that appalling lack of judgment on his part.

Mitt Romney did as well as he could given all the pressure he's faced to mollify the various, competing factions within the Republican Party.

Romney was most successful in putting a human face on his campaign. His sentimentality toward his parents and the obvious love and compassion his wife communicated during her inspirational speech will go a long way in attracting voters.

However, Romney could have done a much better job outlining how he differs from President Obama in his plans to increase jobs and lower the deficit. The public continues to have a dearth of information on this. I doubt many could say today that they have enough to cast a reasoned vote in November.

The biggest problem with this convention was the misrepresentations of facts that spewed from many a speaker's mouth. Indeed, propagandist rhetoric is a necessary evil in election campaigns, But the GOP lost an opportunity to provide an honest, inspiring vision of the country's future. Instead we got out of context slogans like "We Built It" and "Success Tax."

If Romney and the Republicans really want to reverse the 4-years tide of the Obama administration, they must give the public a lot more than out of the side of their mouth talk. Time will tell whether not both get it right.

The Romney campaign clearly believes if he improves his favorable rating he wins. That is not necessarily the case.

President Obama is likely to emphasize policy differences next week. Current economic conditions are already factored into public opinion and Obama has a huge advantage on taxes. Romney is a multi-millionaire advocating higher Medicare costs for seniors and lower tax rates for himself.

Mitt Romney spoke of his family with warmth but left military families out in the cold. On the night he was nominated as the Republicans' candidate for commander in chief, Romney made no mention of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Governor Romney beat the drums for war with tough words for President Obama on Iran yet not a single word for the warriors,

Coming on top of a jobs "plan" that offered few specifics and never mentioned veterans, Romney's military snub is all the more glaring.

America's troops, veterans and military families often state - correctly - that we live with a civilian-military divide. To their credit, President Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, and Blue Star parents Vice President Joe and Dr. Jill Biden are working at literally "Joining Forces" to hire and heal veterans.

Democrats have fought for what VSOs (veterans service organizations) have hailed as unprecedented resources. As a cofounder of the DNC Veterans and Military Families Council, I've urged all candidates to leave no veteran behind in the community or at the ballot box.

All Americans must support troops in deed not just words. But support begins with words - and sadly Mitt Romney offered none to the troops he seeks to lead.

Dewey ClaytonProfessor of Political Science, University of Louisville :

I thought that Romney delivered his best performance yet.

He was able to humanize himself to the audience and the American people. His personal reflections showed a warm side to a man who has come across as aloof and out of touch with average Americans. However, he was not very specific on policies and he continued to distort the truth with some of his accusations against President Obama. His remark that there’s something wrong with the kind of job (Obama’s) done as president when the best feeling you had was the day you voted for him is a prime example.

I remember on the night that President Obama announced that we (America) had captured and killed Osama bin Laden that college students around the country hit the streets for celebrated throughout the country. When interviewed, many of them said that 9/11 was a seminal moment for them and they were glad the U.S. had captured and killed this horrible man.

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